TLDR: As is typical for this time of year, forecasts for the future start to accumulate at the end of November. We are ahead of our time and are already looking into Digital Marketing 2016 as of today. More forecasts will follow.
Ad blockers first gained attention beyond expert silos in 2015.
Springer's move to lock out users with ad blockers was remarkable in every sense of the word.
Even more remarkable, however, will be what is still to come in terms of ad blocking. Three reports from the last few days give a foretaste of this.
Tech Research: Adblockers will trigger the next development push
In a highly interesting article in the Harvard Business Review, open source guru Doc Searls analyzes the growing consumer interest in ad blockers. Triggers include:
- The ignorance of the industry in dealing with the "Do not Track" convention in browsers
- The epidemic spread of tracking and retargeting - ergo: consumers' sense of being harassed by advertising, especially and first in the mobile channel.
These connections are evident to experts. In order to make them accessible to non-experts, Searls has them visualized. Here, using the frequency of search queries (which admittedly is not an outstandingly hard database):
Here are the data for point 1
And here are the data for point 2
Mozilla: Campaign for Ad Blocking and Privacy
Just on the same day, namely today, Mozilla places the following ad for its browser.
Why?
Is Mozilla courting the zero-point-X percent tech nerds who like to tweak their browser configurations? Or are they placing a special theme for the zero-point-Y percent net policy activists who also oppose private surveillance?
Wrong. We are talking about a mass phenomenon that will determine many strategic discussions around digital marketing in 2016.
Facebook: Declares ad blocking an official business risk
Adblockers have been an official stock market topic since November 6, the day Facebook published its quarterly report. You can't get more relevant than that.
Facebook Says Ad-Blocking Technology Could Have Impact on Sales
Our interpretation: Ad Tech must be reassessed in 2016
However adblockers are currently assessed, it is now clear that their influence on the development of digital marketing / programmatic / content marketing is relevant to strategy.
It is not so much Facebook or other platform monopolists that are threatened. It is rather the operators, but above all the users (publishers, advertisers) of ad servers, DSPs, SSPs, retargeting suites, content marketing and content management systems with tracking functions.
Media houses and large online advertisers in particular, but also agencies, will have to reassess their options.
All the signs are that adtech service providers and ad-based business models will come under pressure in 2016.
Who knows whether growth targets will have to be abandoned. What is certain, however, is that in the "tech war" high investments will have to be made to keep tracking-based technologies functional and statistically relevant. That will cost money.
There will be interesting battles, the outcome of which is only clear in one respect: Consumers will not reduce their sensitivity to annoying advertising, especially in the context of "mobile use". And they will use every opportunity to escape surveillance by ad tech.
Questions? We assume so!